Broadcast television receiver ICs deployed within smartphones and other handheld devices typically remain un-powered until the user selects the television function, thus conserving precious battery power at the expense of receiver “boot-up” delay. Unfortunately, the boot-up delay tends to be substantial. First, cost/performance pressure typically dictates omission of non-volatile storage from the television receiver IC so that operating program code (“software”) required by one or more on-chip processors must be loaded into the television receiver IC (e.g., from a separate flash memory or other non-volatile storage) before a broadcast television signal may be displayed. Further, to ensure maximum inter-operability with other components, the code-load interface tends to be a low-bandwidth serial interface (e.g., inter-integrated circuit (I2C) or the like) so that even a relatively small amount of code may require several seconds to load (e.g., more than five seconds to load 128 kilobytes of program code via a 200 KHz I2C interface). Moreover, even after the program code is loaded, initialization of the television receiver functions required for signal reception, decoding and rendering typically consumes several more seconds. Making matters worse, even after the television receiver IC is fully initialized, yet further delay may be incurred awaiting critical rendering information within the incoming television signal itself (e.g., awaiting reception of a reference frame or “intra-frame” within a digital television broadcast). Overall, the delay between selection of the TV function (e.g., button or icon press in the user interface) and video display/audio output may be as long as 8-10 seconds, a frustratingly long time for many users.